17.
A ‘BLUE AND WHITE’ KENDI
Ming dynasty, Wanli period
20 cm high
Naples, Villa della Floridiana, Museo Duca di Martina, Placido de Sangro (1829-1891) collection.
inv. n. 3733.
The water pouring vessel, known as kendi, was made for the export market to Southeast Asian and the Middle-East. The form of the present kendi derived from earlier vessels produced during the fourteenth century (for a Hongwu period underglaze red example, see J. Ayers, Far Eastern Ceramics in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1980, p. 342, pl. 140). This form continued to be popular throughout the Ming and until the mid-Qing period. The immediate influence of such vessels on other cultures can be seen in ‘blue and white’ glazed earthenware kendi produced in Safavid Iran during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, decorated with Chinese style ‘kraak’ designs (see the example in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. n. 431-1878). In the Middle-East kendi were used or adapted as containers for water to cool the smoke of a water pipe or hookah before the smoker inhaled. Kendi bases were made in variety of forms, from the more typical bulbous body seen the present vessels to animal shaped bodies.
This kendi exemplify the most common ewer of this type, and many related pieces are preserved in museums, such as the one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Carswell, Blue and White. Chinese Porcelain and Its Impact on the Western World, exhibition catalogue, Chicago 1985, p. 112, n. 54).
Similar pieces where recovered from the wreck of the Witte Leeuw (1613) (C.L. Van der Pijl-Ketel (edited by), The Ceramic Load of the ‘Witte Leeuw’, Amsterdam 1982, pp. 130-133).
